Unwelcome Bodies

by Jennifer Pelland

  Owen.

  She’s surprised he managed to get here so quickly. She’s surprised that after what he’s done to her, that he still cares. How long until he gives up and fishes out his key? Perhaps she should have bolted the door. Too late now. She’s never getting out of this tub.

  “I never should have lied to you, Callie,” he yells. “I didn’t think you could take it, and that was wrong of me. We’re not supposed to hide things from each other.”

  But that’s all right, because Callie has hidden this from him.

  She hears the jingle of keys, and smiles. It’s time.

  She slides under the water, submerging her face, takes in a deep breath, and surrenders to the flood.

  And it burns.

  Her lungs scream and work to expel the fluid, and Callie claws at the sides of the tub, willing herself to stay under. Why is her body fighting this? She coughs, and struggles to suck in another deep breath of water. Her legs kick out violently, and one of her toes cracks against the porcelain, the pain sharp and fresh. Drowning is supposed to be peaceful. This is how she is supposed to die. It’s not supposed to hurt. The water is supposed to welcome her home.

  But the water refuses.

  It sloshes behind her in a wave, rising, heaving her out of the tub, and Callie lands on the cold, wood floor, struggling to cough out great lungfuls of water just as her brother bursts in. “Oh my god!” he screams, and runs toward her.

  And runs past her.

  He rips down the gauzy turquoise curtains from around the tub and starts desperately trying to sop up all the spilled and vomited water. When the curtains won’t absorb any more, he tosses the sodden mass in the tub, grabs Callie’s bedspread, and throws it over her. “Look at all the water you’ve wasted! What were you thinking?”

  Callie shoves him away and struggles naked to her feet. She staggers away, limping on her broken toe, trailing water behind her, and he pulls off his sweater and tries to mop it up. In a hoarse croak, she says, “Your concern is touching.”

  He grabs her roughly by the arms and says, “You of all people should know better, Callie. You don’t waste water like that. You just don’t.”

  “What do you care? You’ll get more with your rockets.”

  “There are no rockets. There are never going to be any rockets.”

  She stops trying to struggle free of his grasp and stares up at him. “What do you mean?”

  He drops his sweater at her feet, and she drips on it. “Do you really think we’ll live long enough to build rockets? We’ve made no progress, Callie. None. All those times I said I was busy working? They weren’t work. They were Marina.”

  He looks at her for some reaction, but she has none.

  “Actually, that’s not strictly true,” he says. “At first, it was work. But lately…” He turns away, his shoulders sagging inside his worn cotton T-shirt. “We’ve tried everything. Everything, Callie. We don’t even bother going into the office anymore unless one of us manages to come up with a new idea, and even then, it never takes long for one of us to shoot it down.”

  He lets out a long breath and sinks down to the floor, staring up at Callie with the most hopeless expression she’s ever seen. “Callie…we haven’t even figured out how to make a sock without wasting water. There’s no way we’ll ever build a rocket ship. This whole project’s just a…a stupid pipe dream conjured up by idiots like me who can’t accept the fact that the human race is doomed.”

  She looks down at him, and is surprised at how little emotion she feels. “How long do we have?”

  “At this rate? Maybe a hundred years. I don’t know. I mean, we can’t even make a truly leak-proof hab—”

  “But you’re having babies, Owen. Babies. You have to have some hope.”

  Owen shudders and buries his face in his hands. “I’m a selfish fool, Callie.”

  She stares at the tub, at the trail of water she’s left behind her, and looks down at the slick coating still glistening on her body.

  The water rejected her.

  Callie ignores her brother’s sobs and limps to the sonics and stands under them until her skin is crisp and dry again. Then she walks back out and stares at the slick trail leading to the tub, where her brother is slumped in a cross-legged heap.

  Owen looks up at her with puffy, red eyes. “We can cover this up somehow. We don’t need to tell anyone.”

  She cocks her head to the side, staring at the tub appraisingly.

  The water didn’t want her.

  Then what did it want?

  She pads barefoot over the slick and hisses as the water touches the soles of her feet. It feels…

  It feels angry.

  She stares down at the damp patch under her feet and finally understands. Unless the human race cleans up its mess, unless it finds some way to atone for its sins, they will die. The planet has issued its ultimatum. It is time to answer it.

  The water has always been trying to speak to her. She just hasn’t been listening properly. And she is in a unique position to do something about it.

  She opens a link to Jeremy. “Cancel Baton Rouge. Can you physically get me to the Marianas Trench?”

  He shakes his head. “It’s too unstable. The best we can do is file footage.”

  “No, file footage is no good. I need to actually be there. Niagara Falls is close. We’ll do that instead.”

  “A new video?”

  “No, a concert.”

  “We can’t get an audience out there.”

  “It’ll be an online concert.”

  “Got it. I’ll start getting word out.”

  “And I won’t be playing as Undine.”

  “Interesting,” he says. “What’s the deal? A new persona? Or do you want to go by your own name now?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Fair enough.”

  She switches off the connection and turns to her brother. “Go back to your family.”

  “But—”

  “I have a concert to prepare for.”

  He gestures to the tub. “But the water—”

  “Will be taken care of.”

  When he’s gone, she calls the recycling center and reports herself for water wastage. Since she wasted her own water and not the community’s, it’s only a misdemeanor, and she pays the hefty fine gladly. A team scours her apartment for hours, sucking up every last drop.

  And then she prepares.

  * * * *

  Two weeks later, she is standing in her still suit at the base of what was once Niagara Falls. Her costume trunks are scattered around her, all lidded tight.

  It is time.

  She nods, and the director activates the ring of lights and cameras.

  Callie calls up the sound of wind over a sand dune on her mixer, adds in the drone of a wind farm and the clatter of pebbles, and tries to imagine the faces of her online audience. Even though they are all miles and miles away, she can feel the puzzlement radiating off of them like the heat of a desert wind.

  Soon, they’ll understand.

  The roadies set the trunks aflame, sacrificing the remnants of Undine to the Angry Earth, paving way for Sirocco.

  And as Sirocco, she opens her mouth and sings of sand, no longer mourning a world long past, the prophet of this new earth and its new way of life.

  Notes on “Flood”

  I wanted to write a story about a self-absorbed rock star, and I wanted to write a story about a waterless Earth, so I combined the two. I couldn’t tell you why I’m so fascinated with watching self-absorbed celebrities implode. Wait, I can. Schadenfreude. If it weren’t for schadenfreude, some days I’d have no fun at all. But because of that, I thought it would be an interesting mental exercise to try to get inside the head of someone like that and sympathize with her.

  The Call

  WOULD YOU GIVE UP YOUR humanity if it meant saving everyone else’s?

  When the call went out for a volunteer to try to enter the mysterious ship, not knowing who was i
nside or what they wanted with us, would you answer it? Would you say goodbye to all that you knew, divide your belongings into labeled piles to be handed out to your family and friends, kiss the cats on the head, and willingly deliver yourself to the unknown, knowing how many had tried and gruesomely failed before you?

  Would you step forward out of a sense of duty to your species and your planet? Would you instead be interested in being the first human that the aliens allowed to meet them in person? Would you be in it simply for your ticket to fame and historical immortality? Or would you really just be running away from a life that was too difficult and complicated to keep living anymore, hoping that by surrendering yourself to the ship, you’d never need to worry about messy human choices again?

  Would you swallow your fear, stand in line until your turn came, then walk up the ramp to the gleaming silver sphere, the eyes of the world upon your back, and not hesitate, not tremble, not turn and run back to your flawed life, however short it might end up being if the wrong volunteer got inside the sphere and ruined things for Earth?

  When the door irised open to admit you, and you realized that you alone had been chosen to enter, would you step over the bodies of those who had tried before you and walk through? Would your chin be held high? Would your cheeks be dry? Would you be curious? Terrified? Resigned? Proud? Some bowel-loosening combination of all of the above? Would you look at it as a sacrifice or an adventure? Or would you be too numb with shock to make that sort of fine distinction?

  When the door whispered shut and they reached for you, would you shrink from their gelatinous touch? Would you gag when you saw their formless bodies, quivering and gleaming in the strangely low gravity? Would you beg them to find someone else to take your place? Would you turn and pound on the seamless doorway, hoping to find a way out of the brightly-lit spherical prison?

  Would you scream when they jellied your bones and reshaped them into arcane loops and whorls? Would you desperately try to press your skin back to your flesh after they’d slowly peeled it off and discarded it? Would you rail and beat the mush that was once your hands against the pearly carapace they’d poured you into to try and give you a semblance of your former shape, something for your once-fellow humans to identify with?

  Would you cling with tattered will to your sanity as they unspooled the layers of your mind, peering into every nook and cranny, dredging up every iota of schoolyard humiliation, every love affair gone wrong, every trip to the emergency room, every screaming fight your parents had had when they thought you weren’t home, every drunken confession of lust, every mortifying, self-aggrandizing lie you wished you could take back? Would you survive the onslaught of all your life’s memories bombarding you in a nanosecond’s rush? Would your mental screams resonate from the walls of your misshapen skull as they plunged icy daggers into your brain, carving it, rending it, giving it shapes and contours no human mind had ever had to bear?

  Would you recognize the moment when your soul froze and shattered into a trillion pieces, fleeing from the body that it no longer recognized, no longer fit?

  When they finally finished, when you were first able to hear their multilayered thoughts in your head, when you finally learned their plans for your people and your planet, would you overcome your madness to act as a proper diplomat for Earth, just as you’d volunteered to, negotiating in good faith for its future in a galactic civilization? Or would you lash out mentally, taking revenge for the tortures they’d heaped upon your body and mind? When they attempted to explain that they didn’t understand the concept of “pain,” would you show them what it meant by hurling your fresh memories at them to make them feel each and every moment of your reshaping? When they pleaded for you to stop and you suddenly understood that they had no defense against your assault, would you continue on until their minds had fallen silent, their quivering bodies nothing more than motionless blobs clinging to the walls of the gleaming white sphere?

  And then would you soar from the ship in your pearly shell and survey the wreckage of your former life, trying to find any sort of connection to it? Would you even attempt to identify with these meat beings that used to be the center of your existence? Would you feel anything when the people who had so recently been such an integral part of your life screamed and shrank from the sight of you, not understanding what you were, or who you had once been? Would you feel your mangled bones grow cold as you realized that you could no longer remember what love felt like, when you realized that you were incapable of wanting it, of missing it?

  When you understood that there was no hope of going back, what would you do? Would you surrender to the tugging tendrils of insanity? Try to find a way to end your reshaped life? Or would you take the spherical ship up into orbit and become the guardian of this planet you no longer belonged to, waiting for the next wave of invaders to come, intercepting them and making them understand pain?

  If you knew all this, would you answer the call?

  I wouldn’t have.

  Notes on “The Call”

  I can’t really remember what inspired me to write this, other than a desire to try something stylistically different. And now that I’ve written my second person, all-question story, I never have to do either of those tricks again.

  Captive Girl

  IN THE CHOREOGRAPHED CHAOS OF space, she searches for patterns that do not fit. She listens to the hiss and murmur of the interstellar winds; she peers into the visible spectrum and beyond. Whistling particles stream by, and her mind sizes them up, then discards them as harmless background radiation. Just flotsam on the solar winds. Wait, that light— No, it’s just a weather satellite catching a glint of sun. Too close, anyway. She does not let anything approach the planet without scrutiny.

  Motion.

  She zooms in, listening hard.

  “A-s-t-e-r-o-i-d,” she types out. “Possible collision course.”

  There is a scroll across the very bottom of her vast vision. “We see it. Calculating now.”

  She looks away. The team is on it. This asteroid could simply be a distraction, and she does not want to be caught unawares. There will be no repeat of last time. Not on her watch.

  “It’s a miss,” the scroll says. “Shift’s over. Come on back.”

  And her mind contracts, sinking down, down, plummeting back to the surface of the planet, past the colony domes, into the bunkers, deep underground.

  Alice gasps through her chest tube as she crashes back into her body.

  Mittened hands grope at the metal mask welded to her face, and she’s shocked to realize that they’re hers. She sags forward onto her walker, resting the mask on the padded bar that rings her. She is too tired to call up any video, any audio, and surrenders her overextended senses to nothingness. She struggles to walk forward a few steps, but the seat/body interface chafes, and she works her mouth in a silent gasp behind the metal.

  Soft hands are on her back, and she trembles.

  With a faint volley of static, her earpieces switch over to internal audio. “It’s all right. Just relax. You’re with us again.”

  With her tongue controls, she types out, “Marika.”

  And the hands move to the back of her bare scalp, running along the edges of the mask, along super-sensitized skin. “I’m here.”

  Alice grips the walker tight in her mittened hands, every part of her body warm and shivery. She clenches around the seat/body interface and lets a hard breath out through her chest tube.

  She feels a light kiss on her scalp, and Marika whispers, “They’re watching.”

  “I know,” Alice types back. “I don’t care.”

  Marika pulls off Alice’s mittens, takes her nail-less hands in hers, and says, “My beautiful captive girl.”

  Behind her mask, Alice swoons.

  She hears the rude buzz of the intercom, and over it, Dr. Qureshi says, “That was a good shift, Alice.”

  “Thank you,” she types.

  “Dr. DeVeaux, I’d like to have a word with you
.”

  “I’m busy with Alice,” Marika replies, and gently kneads Alice’s shoulders through her thin cotton gown. Alice’s head swims, and she rocks the mask back and forth across the bar. Why won’t they just leave the two of them alone?

  “We need to discuss Selene’s readings,” Dr. Qureshi says.

  “I want Marika to stay.”

  “I really do need her help.”

  Marika leans in and whispers, “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” She gives Alice’s shoulders a squeeze, and when she lets them go, the shock of absence makes Alice draw in a pained gasp through her chest tube.

  And then she is alone, a woman behind a solid metal mask, with ears calibrated for the solar winds, and eyes that can only see the stars.

  * * * *

  Marika is kept away all night. Alice has to amuse herself by watching feeds and vids, because her only other options are music, which is too passive to keep her input-starved brain occupied for long, and conversation, which is currently impossible. Jayna is on shift right now, Selene is sleeping, and the caretakers are all busy discussing how to keep her from going even more insane.

  They are a shift of three. There can be no replacements.

  Alice briefly scans the news feeds, hoping for distraction, and finds that as usual, nothing has changed. The relief convoy from Earth is still on hold, the rebuilding continues to go slowly, and there is still no real information on the mysterious black ships that nearly destroyed their colony ten years ago. The talking heads just keep rehashing all their old theories—that it was aliens trying to drive humans from their first and only extra-solar colony, that United Earth sent the ships to punish the colonists for forming an independent government, that it was the wrath of some angry god, that it was a natural phenomenon that only looked like spaceships, that the colony government bombed its own domes to cover up some unspeakable crime. She’s heard it all before. None of it makes any difference to her. None of it changes her job.